VILLENEUVE-LÈS-AVIGNON Caroline Hinault wins the Readers’ Prize at the Polar Festival
First novel, and first prize: Caroline Hinault won the readers’ prize of the 17th Polar Festival this Saturday in Villeneuve, with Solak (ed. Rouergue Noir), his first novel.
And to think that at the base, this novel was not even a noir novel. “I didn’t build it like a thriller, but like an atmospheric novel, she explains. I didn’t know I was going to write a noir novel, but it was my publishing house that told me that my text was one, I’m very happy. “
Suddenly, his text does not really correspond to the codes of the genre: no survey for example, but “A rise towards something dramatic”, she advances, in a collected story “Written at once, very oral”. The story ? A camera between four characters, three soldiers and a scientist, isolated on a peninsula north of the Arctic Circle, a place called Solak which gives its name to the novel but which the author invented.
“At the start there are three characters, two soldiers and a scientist who survive on an abandoned base”, she explains. The narrator is the oldest of the soldiers, there for twenty years. “Cohabitation is already difficult, and a fourth man, a young soldier, is hoisted to the base to spend the arctic night there, he will upset the fragile balance”, continues Caroline Hinault.
In this camera, the author, professor of letters in Rennes in the civil, unfolds a tragedy in the first sense of the term, “With a rise towards the tragic which we do not know where it will strike. ” Caroline Hinault explores the interiority of her characters, boredom, anxieties, the past and their masculinity. “What interested me was to write about things that are completely unknown to me, to imagine all these sensations of extreme cold, isolation and questioning masculinity”, says Caroline Hinault.
The author does not intend to stop there and already completed his next book, which will have nothing to do with the thriller world, since its theme will be pregnancy, “On the question of the incarnation and the stakes of the pregnant body. “ Will we see her again at the Polar Festival? Without a doubt : “It is very likely that I will rewrite thrillers”, she confides, while adding: ” but not only. “
Thierry allard
The Villeneuve Polar Festival continues this Sunday at the Chartreuse, Fort Saint-André, the Pierre-de-Luxembourg museum and the conference hall. Full program here.